With kyazoonga.com, Neetu Bhatia’s opened a window to democratised access to sports & entertainment

Cash is still the king. At least in India it is, and so it took Neetu Bhatia no time to pull her ticket counter out of the kyazoonga.com window and extend it to people via partners including multiplex operators, cricket and sports franchises, concert promoters and event organizers. CEO, chairman and co-founder of one of India’s first movie, cricket, entertainment and sports ticketing company, Neetu, through KyaZoonga worked every step of the plan - “democratize access and provide full service, one which goes beyond just sales on tickets online.” After tying up with major multiplex operators around two years back for sale of tickets and movie merchandise, Neetu moved to the next national obsession - cricket. In town to launch ticket sales along with Punjab Cricket Association for the fourth One Day International Match in the India vs. Australia series to be held at Mohali on November 2, Neetu’s aim is to “create a market for interactive, centralized and end-to-end ticketing in the entertainment and sports industry verticals.”

To make things easier, they now have a tie-up with Bharat Petroleum, enabling customers to search, find and transact at a central location. But how did an investment banker end up selling tickets? “We left India for the States about 15 years back. A couple of years ago, we came for a holiday and found it cumbersome to check film listings and stand in line for the tickets. That’s when my brother, Akash, came up with this idea of a ticketing portal,” she ran it through her godmother Dr Kiran Bedi, got the whacky name from ad man Prahlad Kakkar and is now full time into it. “We are the first company to have sold an end-to-end ticketing solution for a cricket match through online, first to have partnered with multiple IPL teams, first company to have introduced the concept of online ticket bookings for adventure parks in the country, ticketed the first Commonwealth Youth Games held in Pune in 2008 and created the first scalable and aggregator web 2.0 portal for movies in April 2007 with PVR, Inox, Fun and Cinemax as partners.” Wow!

... contd.